Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Marcel Breuer’s tubular-steel chairs and the glass-walled buildings copied from Walter Gropius are everywhere. Can a retrospective on the Bauhaus -- the art school that nurtured such work -- say anything new?

At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” shatters the tidy narrative of industrialized progress constructed by its chief exponents and abetted by historians, though it doesn’t attempt to account for the horrors perpetrated under the Modernist banner.

The familiar Bauhaus aesthetic is all crisp, platonic geometries, machined surfaces and forms in space.

Step into the first gallery at MoMA and you think you’ve entered a mad monastery. The spinning shapes of the painting “Ascent and Resting Point,” by Johannes Itten, an influential Bauhaus teacher, evoke a feverish spirituality. Pottery, woodcuts and hand-bound books suggest a craft guild more than the industry-obsessed art school it later became.

Gropius conceived the Bauhaus from the merger of a state art academy and an applied-arts school in Weimar, Germany. The diverse and tentative works of the school’s initial years reflect the early 20th century’s welter of art movements. Bauhauslers tried to make sense of a war-torn world of rapid industrialization and seismic economic upheaval.

Beset by perpetual money problems and vilified for left- wing politics, the school lasted a mere 14 years. It went through three directors and moved twice. Gropius soon began sidelining craft as he sought a unity of art and industrial technique.

Reunification

Itten didn’t fit in and he left in 1923, yet his influence lived on in the lovely color studies he asked his students to make. Look at the delicate compositions by Paul Klee and room- color schemes that anticipate the monumental calm of Minimalism. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is well-represented in geometric canvasses.

With German reunification, curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman have been able to obtain rarely seen objects.

Subtle variations in texture soften the striking geometries of textiles. Typewriter numbers and slashes delicately pattern beautiful wallpapers. Impish Surrealism draws the eye to photomontages.     Gropius moved toward industrial technique in part to raise cash he desperately needed. His partnerships with ceramics workshops and light-fixture makers weren’t profitable, but they produced the famous tea sets and tubular-steel chairs. You can buy the Bauhaus Table Lamp by Carl J. Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld in the museum shop.

Hyperinflation

The convulsive struggles between the left-wingers of the Weimar and the rightists who would coalesce under Hitler buffeted the school. Type designer Herbert Bayer’s handsome billion-mark note reminds viewers of the era’s ravaging hyperinflation.

The industrial aesthetic could become obsessive. A vintage film shows a housewife robotically slamming dishes into the ultra-functional cabinets of her modern kitchen. It evokes the obsessions to come. The school spread its influence through its second home in Dessau, a 1926 complex Gropius composed of intersecting platonic solids in glass and white plaster.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose classic chairs are displayed, struggled to hold the Bauhaus together under rising Nazism. He failed, and later unsuccessfully sought work from the regime.

Under Mies, visionary urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer drew identical factory-produced housing running all the way to the horizon. Soon we got the reality of sterile, centrally planned Soviet cities, isolating Paris suburbs, and public- housing towers that deadened American urban renewal.

Pan Am Bloat

Gropius moved to the U.S., ran Harvard University’s architecture school and plopped the bloated Pan Am building in front of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The backlash against assembly-line buildings and cities came, and relegated the Bauhaus largely to museum gift shops.

Yet Bauhaus proteges also expanded cities to accommodate modern life, poking green parks into dank Amsterdam, economically sheltering Europe’s ill-housed millions from Stockholm to Vienna -- efforts that had to be made and largely succeeded.

Bergdoll and Dickerman don’t set out any revisionist view of the Bauhaus legacy. The result is to resuscitate the aesthetic and play down the controversial, socially grounded aspirations of the Bauhaus and Modernism. They let the Bauhaus breathe outside the agendas of advocates and skeptics -- if that’s possible.

“Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” is on view until Jan. 25 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. in New York. Information: +1-212-708-9400; http://www.moma.org/visit.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: November 16, 2009 00:01 EST